


Turn Up the Signal (Wipe Out the Noise)

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-10
Updated: 2010-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:11:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>John opened his eyes and Sherlock was there.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn Up the Signal (Wipe Out the Noise)

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Renenet, Iulia, and Miss Pamela for encouragement, and Omphale for beta!

John was back in Afghanistan. He was dressed all wrong, pyjamas under his flak vest and helmet, but definitely back in Afghanistan. He'd know it anywhere: the endless hours of a convoy ride, sitting with his kit between his feet and waiting for something to happen. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. God, it was hot, and so horribly quiet; he could hear the man next to him breathing. In fact he recognized the sound, and John turned his head with a frown to ask the man beside him what the hell he was doing there.

John opened his eyes and Sherlock was there, _right_ there, almost nose to nose with him in his bed. John startled backward and said what he'd meant to say anyway, a little higher-pitched. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Definitive," Sherlock replied. "Absolutely definitive. You didn't startle until you actually saw me."

"You're in my _bed_ , why are you in my bed? Are you doing experiments in my bed, now, at--" John pushed up on one elbow to see past Sherlock to the beside clock, "--two in the morning? You can't possibly be this bored yet, we just finished a case."

When he looked back at Sherlock, Sherlock looked faintly irritated. "Fine, then. I'll go."

"Good, yes, _go_ ," John said, and Sherlock flung back the covers and rolled gracefully out of John's bed, snagging his dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door as he let himself out. John stared at the door a moment--Sherlock had been in his bed _naked_ \--but not like that, not naked like that, because he'd just been lying there staring at John. It had all been an experiment, at two in the morning, in John's bed.

John rolled over and buried his face in his pillow. It was cooler in his bed now, without Sherlock under the covers, but still quiet. He thought, not for the first time, that he needed to get one of those CDs of soothing nature sounds, except he didn't think they made them for people who really just wanted to fall asleep to the sound of sporadic small-arms fire, punctuated by shelling and sundry explosions, between one and five kilometers off. He was nearly asleep despite the quiet when he realized what Sherlock had said first.

It was true: he hadn't jerked out of the dream. He hadn't startled until he saw Sherlock so close. John hadn't been able to sleep at all with Sarah in the same bed, constantly snapping into consciousness because someone else was in his space--but Sherlock had come in, undressed, and gotten under the covers with him, and he'd slept through all of it.

"Hell," John mumbled into the pillow, and then he was asleep.

 

* * *

 

Next morning, John was pretty sure that even if it hadn't been a dream, it was best if he pretended it was. Sherlock was doing something fiendish in the kitchen, anyway, and didn't give John a chance to ask him about it even if he'd wanted one, which, for the record, he didn't.

 

* * *

 

John was starting to get used to the way that, at random moments--in the shower, for instance, or when he was lying in bed--he would find himself thinking of that glimpse of Sherlock's naked body. It kept suggesting adjectives like _lithe_ and _sculpted_ and _Oh Christ, kill me now_ to John's mind. Clearly he spent too much time mentally composing blog entries about Sherlock.

He was in the shower now, and he was thinking of Sherlock, but not at all of blog entries, when he heard the bathroom door open. Before he had a chance to think _I'm sure I locked that_ , Sherlock's head poked through the curtain. Sherlock raked a thoughtful look up and down John's body. John did not jump back--it would only lead to slipping and falling and probably a head injury and God only knew what Sherlock would feel justified doing at that point--but he couldn't resist the reflex of covering himself.

Sherlock said, "Yes, as I expected. And really nothing to be ashamed of, John."

"Get _out_ ," John snarled, feeling himself revert instantly to the age of fourteen, with Harry barging into the bathroom at exactly the wrong moment. "Don't say anything, just _get out of the bathroom_ , now, go."

Sherlock looked annoyed, but he drew his head back and snapped the curtain shut. He slammed the door on the way out, and John stepped out of the shower to lock it behind him.

"That's just spiteful," Sherlock said from the other side. "Obviously I can pick the lock, I just did."

John squeezed his eyes shut, excruciatingly aware that he was standing naked, dripping, on the bathroom floor, still half-hard, and that Sherlock was directly on the other side of the extremely flimsy door, apparently feeling petulant because John refused to be the subject of a sudden-shower-invasion experiment.

"Go," John said. "Away."

 

* * *

 

John was standing next to Lestrade in the corner where Sherlock had banished them both while he circled the corpse. John's expertise wasn't needed any closer up, since the cause of death seemed to be a fairly unambiguous _hacked up into pieces_. There were, in fact, some pieces missing, but Sherlock had identified those at a glance, down to the specific bones and anatomical structures taken and left behind.

So John stood in the corner, watching Sherlock work, trying to look thoughtful and prepared to offer a valuable insight at any moment. Lestrade, beside him, had given up after the first five minutes and was now checking messages on his mobile.

"John," Sherlock said, without looking up, "walk back round to the door. Lestrade, you stay right there."

Lestrade shuffled aside to let John go past him, and John walked back around the perimeter of the room to the door. Sherlock led the way out the door, texting furiously, and John followed him through the house, out the back door into the garden, through the garden gate, down one alley, and around a corner into another. There were some bins here; perhaps this was where the rest of the body parts had been dumped. Sherlock finally looked up from his phone, glanced around, and then pointed to a particular spot along one blank brick wall, well away from the bins.

"Here. Kneel."

John knelt down, looking around as he did. What had Sherlock brought him to see? There was nothing on the ground--nothing he could see, anyway, but was that a bloodstain, there? He looked up to ask Sherlock, only to find himself staring at Sherlock's hands, which were directly in front of his face, unfastening Sherlock's belt.

"Wait," John said, reflexively, and Sherlock gave an irritated huff and stopped. John looked up at him, and found exactly the same impatient expression on his face that he'd had when he was naked in John's bed, and when he walked in on John in the shower.

John stood up, grabbed hold of Sherlock's belt himself, and swung Sherlock around to push him up against the wall. He'd apparently succeeded in surprising--well, at least confusing--Sherlock, because Sherlock let himself be pushed.

"That's what it's all been," John said, "I was standing there watching you work, thinking I'd like to push you up against a wall and suck you off when you look like that, and you thought we should just go and _do_ that, then, because you could tell _exactly what I wanted_. And in the shower. And in my bed. I didn't even know, when you were in my bed, but you knew, and you didn't bother to tell me."

"Why should I tell you?" Sherlock said, still not pushing John away, merely rolling his eyes impatiently. "You were the one standing there wanting me so badly you might as well have it in neon lights. I was just following through."

"Following--" John repeated, looking away, up and down the little alleyway Sherlock had brought him to. "And what's this, then? Why here? Why did we just walk out of a crime scene?"

"CCTV blind spot," Sherlock said. "The case was obvious, I already texted Lestrade. You wanted to have me up against a wall, here's a wall, why are we still talking?"

There was no good answer to that question, so John kissed him. Sherlock kissed back--Sherlock kissed back like a maniac, hungry and impatient, leaving John dizzy. Sherlock also batted John's hands away from his belt, getting it unfastened for himself. He opened his own trousers while John was still trying to catch up with the kissing--one hand on Sherlock's cheek, the other holding on to his shoulder for balance.

Sherlock stopped kissing him all at once--no lingering drag of lips, no hesitation. Sherlock just jerked his head back and said, "Kneel."

John did. Sherlock already had his cock out, his hand wrapped around it. He was hard, and the whiteness of his fingers was a startling contrast against his dark-flushed cock, and he definitely had nothing to be ashamed of. Apart from his pick-up technique, but then again that seemed to have worked out just like everything else Sherlock did.

John wrapped one hand around Sherlock's, and braced the other against Sherlock's thigh. He still had his trousers pulled up, so John had grey flannel under one hand and Sherlock's skin under the other. He closed his eyes and leaned into it, opening his mouth to let Sherlock in. Sherlock shifted his hand from underneath John's so that he was guiding John's grip, and his other hand came down to John's cheek as he pushed into John's mouth.

Sherlock fucked his mouth, requiring nothing of John but a half-credible attempt to keep up, and John sucked his cock and tried to breathe and thought _of course it's like this, I should have known it would be like this_. Sherlock pulled out of John's mouth a second before John started laughing, and even laughing felt like sex, his lips raw and his mouth full of the taste and smell of cock and the faint chemical odor that always lingered around Sherlock's hands. John turned his head enough to close his lips around Sherlock's thumb, and nearly choked trying to hold his laughter back.

When he looked up, Sherlock didn't look impatient at all. He looked fascinated--he looked like _John_ was fascinating. John's breath stopped all at once, and he had to close his eyes again. He opened his mouth to try to say something, only to feel Sherlock's thumb trace--gently, infinitely gently--across his lower lip.

John squeezed on Sherlock's cock and brought it back to his mouth, and Sherlock's hand moved to the back of his head, holding him still. John could hear Sherlock's breathing even over the rushing of blood in his own ears, but when he said, "John," it was just a broken gasp. Still, John understood. He swallowed as Sherlock came and squeezed his other hand on Sherlock's thigh, which trembled.

"Before you say anything," Sherlock said, while John still had his head tipped back and his mouth open, breathing like a bellows, like he'd just done something completely insane--invading Afghanistan or chasing a cab across London or sucking Sherlock off in a CCTV blind spot twenty feet off a busy street.

"I would just like to point out," Sherlock said, "I had been waiting for that for eight days, eleven hours, and forty-seven minutes."

John tipped his head back down and looked at Sherlock, then at his watch, then back up at Sherlock.

"Since I kicked you out of my bed," John said. "You'd been--waiting."

John was not entirely sure how many times he'd wanked in the last eight and a half days, but it had been several more than _none_ , and he hadn't even known what was going on.

"I didn't want a _wank_ ," Sherlock said, scornfully, with his trousers still open and his legs still, very faintly, shaking. "I wanted you."

John grinned. "Well, here I am. Why are we still talking?"

"Somehow I got the idea you preferred a warning," Sherlock said, and then he hauled John up by the shirtfront and swung him around and up against the wall.

Sherlock kissed him while he undid John's trousers, kissed him with his hand on John's cock. Sherlock was very, very good with his hands, and John's brain stopped trying to put anything into words for a while, except _Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock_.

"Yes," Sherlock muttered against his lips. "I know. Hush."

John bit his lip, and grinned, and came all over Sherlock's brilliant fingers. He felt Sherlock tuck him back in and zip him up--left-handed--and opened his eyes just in time to see Sherlock licking his fingers clean. It wasn't--John didn't think it was, or he didn't think Sherlock meant it to be--sexy licking, just catlike fastidiousness. John made a broken, wanting sound anyway, and Sherlock looked up, one eyebrow raised.

"Yes, if you like," he said, sounding thoughtful. "But we'd better go back to the flat for that."


End file.
